Indigenous Statistics

A Quantitative Research Methodology

Maggie Walter, Chris Andersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315426556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

In the first book ever published on Indigenous quantitative methodologies, Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen open up a major new approach to research across the disciplines and applied fields. While qualitative methods have been rigorously critiqued and reformulated, the population statistics relied on by virtually all research on Indigenous peoples continue to be taken for granted as straightforward, transparent numbers. This book dismantles that persistent positivism with a forceful critique, then fills the void with a new paradigm for Indigenous quantitative methods, using concrete examples of research projects from First World Indigenous peoples in the United States, Australia, and Canada. Concise and accessible, it is an ideal supplementary text as well as a core component of the methodological toolkit for anyone conducting Indigenous research or using Indigenous population statistics.

21Chapter 1

Deficit Indigenes

Introduction

This chapter explores how dominant quantitative methodologies shortchange Indigenous communities. We use Canadian and Australian examples from our own work to explore how statistical constructions of Indigeneity are played out on a terrain of racialization¹ specific to Canada’s and Australia’s colonial contexts. We know from discussions with our colleagues in Aotearoa New Zealand, the continental United States, Hawaii, and those nation-states that now encompass Sami lands that the issues we identify in this chapter are directly pertinent to their own experiences and understandings of how Indigenous statistics are done. These issues are, we argue, part of the broader effects of colonialism on the investment of Indigenous identity in statistical forms, which are not specific to individual nation-states. Rather, we restrict the nation-state frame of our discussion because that is the limit of our expertise, and we do not wish to speak for other first world colonized Indigenous peoples.

Development literature dominates contemporary discussions about research on Indigenous communities across first world colonizing nation-states. What is less discussed, however, is the central role of statistics and statistical analysis within the development discourse and policy action. What we highlight in this chapter is how the categories utilized to collect data are methodologically configured to produce only certain kinds of data. In both Canada and Australia, the guiding quantitative methodology rather than the quantitative method itself shapes and limits the data and their utility. The outcome is that rather than presenting numerical pictures of reality, as they are usually portrayed, Indigenous statistics become intensely political. Methodologically, they are colonizer-settler 22artifacts that serve their masters and disserve their subjects, and they do so in a manner that has become the norm, and as such, requires little thought or consciousness about their restrictiveness.

The Neo-Colonial Alliance of Statistics and Policy

In Canada and Australia, statistics about Indigenous peoples are enmeshed in discourses associated with long-standing government policies that aim to “close the (socioeconomic) gap” between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous populations. The unacknowledged power relations inherent in these discourses position the Indigenous population as in need of being ‘brought up’ to the non-Indigenous standard in educational, labor market, and other socioeconomic indicators, and produce statistical configurations anchored in development or deficit-based understandings of Indigenous peoples and communities. There is an extensive literature documenting the evolution of development studies, its explicit roots in modernity, and the colonial projects that comprise it as a field (see, for example, Desai and Potter 2002; Kothari 2005; Peet and Hartwick 2009). This literature documents the discursive shift between colonial and contemporary times of perceiving the ‘problem’ of Indigenous people from one of inconvenient continued existence and biological inferiority to one of inconvenient cultural uniqueness and culturally linked behavioral deviation.

In both Canada and Australia, the contemporary response to the statistically defined Indigenous problem is the creation and longstanding presence of a massive public policy infrastructure. This infrastructure is primarily dedicated to accurately measuring the “developmental lag” of “their” Indigenous communities and ruminating on how to best govern and “fix” our seemingly endemic problems and chronic conditions. This has been termed as “demography of disadvantage” (Jones 2004; Taylor 2004). In Canada, for example, the federal government likes to tout that it spends billions yearly on alleviating these conditions, allocations most recently geared toward health, employment, and training. In Australia, officials similarly recently pointed to an investment of more than nine billion dollars to be expended over the next six to ten years on behalf of Indigenous Australians (FAHCSIA 2012).

Historically, as liberal nation-states moved out of explicit administrative attempts to assimilate Indigenous communities toward a more integrative colonialism that assumed that Indigenous peoples would (want to) become an economic and political part of the nation-state, government policy began to dedicate itself to improving the social and material conditions of Indigenous communities and individuals. Gone was the era of targeted surveillance and disciplinary measures like those found in Church- or state-run schools for Indigenous children. Increasingly, Aboriginal communities were incorporated into an expanding policy ethos that presupposed that we could and should participate in modern 23life—but only if we were willing to do so within its increasingly narrow norms (see Shewell 2008).

Along these lines, welfare “improvement” programs were fashioned, and program officers intervened into Aboriginal communities in the context of these new rationalities. Of course, given classic liberalism’s conflation of moral improvement with economic productivity, accompanying these changing rationalities were government-initiated “grand schemes of development that affected resources and Indigenous peoples in ‘peripheral areas’. These included, among others, agrarian reform, agricultural colonization, green revolution schemes, road building, dams, mining and oil exploration and production” (Blazer et al. 2004: 6) in both countries and efforts to “normalize” many predominantly Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander communities via the introduction of good governance, self reliance, and self support schemes (such as the Community Development Employment Scheme) in Australia (Petersen and Sanders 1998) and the so-called “White Paper” in Canada (Chretien 2011 [1969]).

If statistical information was increasingly crucial to the modern governing of Aboriginal communities in Canada and Australia, however, the categories through which such information was (and is) collected and analyzed remained firmly rooted in the administrative ideals of previous eras. While the changing rationalities of government shifted the kinds of relationships through which government officials attempted to engage with Indigenous communities, per capita investment in these communities—in the absence, incidentally, of any sustained input from the Indigenous communities into which it was to be invested—remained much lower than that invested into non-Indigenous communities in both countries (see Milloy 2008 for a Canadian discussion; see Altman et al. 2008 for an Australian one). Thus, these newly “integrative” governing rationalities took place almost entirely at the pace of government and, over time, helped produce the conditions of an increasingly low quality of life for many Indigenous individuals, families, and communities.

To rationalize and measure their process, since the 1960s for Canada and the 1970s for Australia, succeeding government administrations have commissioned numerous official reports documenting, and making suggestions for improving, the conditions of their respective Aboriginal populations. In Canada, this era began with the publication of the Hawthorn Report in 1966, and though continuing today, was again brought to the forefront of public attention with the 1996 publication of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. This thirty-year era has apparently convincingly demonstrated the tremendous gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. For example, in the mid-1960s the authors of the Hawthorn Report originally wrote that “it has become increasingly evident in recent years...that the majority of the Indian population constitutes a group economically depressed in terms of the standards that have 24become widely accepted in Canada…[and] there are indications that the gap between the two groups is widening” (1966 part 1: 21). Thirty years later, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) stated that while conditions in our communities had improved since 1966, a massive gap still existed in relation to the quality of life of non-Aboriginal Canadians, characterized by social conditions in which:

Life expectancy is lower. Illness is more common. Human problems, from family violence to alcohol abuse, are more common too. Fewer children graduate from high school. Far fewer go on to colleges and universities. The homes of Aboriginal people are more often flimsy, leaky and overcrowded. Water and sanitation systems in Aboriginal communities are more often inadequate. Fewer Aboriginal people have jobs. More spend time in jails and prisons.²

To give one example of this apparently dire picture, below is a graph (Figure 1.1) of the differential between the Aboriginal and the non-Aboriginal Community Well-Being Index (CWI). The CWI measures the relative quality of life of First Nations and Inuit communities in comparison to non-Aboriginal communities in Canada. Four indicators shape this measure: education, labor 25force participation, income, and a qualitative and quantitative housing measure (see O’Sullivan 2011). Though for First Nations only, the CWI figure demonstrates convincingly that while the quality of life measures for First Nations and non-Aboriginal communities have both grown steadily over the past three decades, the quality of life for First Nations still remains far below that for non-Aboriginals.

Figure 1.1: The Community Well-Being Index (CWI): Measuring Well-Being in First Nations and Non-Aboriginal Communities, 1981–2006.

Source: Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, 2011. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, 2013.

Similarly, in Australia Indigenous statistics are a core business of the national government statistical agencies, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). Indigenous peoples make up around 2.5 percent of Australia’s total population and are comprised of two separate groups, Australian Aborigines (90 percent) and people from the Torres Strait Islands (10 percent) (AIHW 2011a). The limited availability of policy-relevant Indigenous data was identified as a significant problem by the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC 1991). In partial response the AIHW now produces a biennial report, The Health and Welfare of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People. As a further response, the federal government commissioned the 1994 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey (NATSIS): the first Australian national specific Indigenous data collection exercise, and additional NATSIS data collections have occurred in 2002 and 2008 (with another due in 2014).

In more recent years, as the “Closing the Gap” policy direction has gained momentum, there have been increasing demands for Indigenous population statistics to satisfy the emergent “evidence based” policy dictum. From 2008 26the Australian Prime Minister has given an annual Closing the Gap report to Parliament, outlining how its policies are being implemented and presenting statistical analyses of their results so far. Yet, despite the increasing focus, the evidence to date merely confirms that apart from small changes and largely short term, incremental changes, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders remain firmly embedded at the bottom of every socio-economic indicator, as shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1: Australian National Demographic and Socio-Economic Comparison: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Population

	Indigenous %	Non-Indigenous %
Proportion of the population	2.5	97.5
Aged 0–14 years	37	19
Aged 50 years +	11	31
School retention rate to Year 12	47	79
Aged 25-34 years and completed Year 12	30	73
Labor force participation	65	79
Home owners or purchasers	32	66
Live in overcrowded conditions	25	4
Rate of diabetes (age standardized)	12	4

Source: Statistics drawn from AIHW (2011a)

In addition, our mortality and morbidity rates also stand out for all the wrong reasons: we are likely to die eleven years before our non-Indigenous counterparts; we retain much higher rates of infant mortality and lower birth weights. Adding to this somber picture are the data indicating that we are imprisoned at about seventeen times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians (AIHW 2011a; Walter 2008). Moreover, while the majority of our Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander population is urban and only around one quarter of our population resides in remote locations, we share a common low socio-economic position. Poverty may be more visible in our remote communities, but remains the predominant material state of Australian Indigenous peoples regardless of where we live.

Regardless of the lack of progress in closing the gap, the policy response is more of the same: more behavioral intervention to address perceived Aboriginal deficits. For example, the non-attendance of children at school can now lead to their parents’ welfare payments being suspended (Gordon 2011). This is not to suggest that such tough love policies are not well intended—there is a genuine desire among politicians and policy makers to reduce the socio-economic disparity between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians; rather, the point is that with the nation-state only being able to see Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as in deficit, Indigenous policy also can only be seen through the lens of changing the Indigene to be more “normal.”

Increasingly, the lack of policy success is also being linked to Indigenous behavioral deficits. In interviews relating to “Closing the Gap: Prime Minister’s Report 2013,” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard admitted that Indigenous children’s literacy and numeracy results had not improved, and may have in fact worsened, since the previous year. She immediately followed this admission with the comment: “I have real fears that the rivers of grog that wreak [havoc] [sic] among Indigenous communities are starting to flow once again” (Woodley 2013: 1). The juxtaposition is very telling in what it did not say. She did not point out that the literacy and numeracy results applied across the nation but that the alcohol laws to which she was obliquely referring only applied to one small state.

What do these dire statistical pictures mean? We think Māori scholar Hokowhitu’s (2009) concept of the “Indigeneity of immediacy” can help us think outside the dominant discourses that mark much of the debate in statistical discussions of Indigeneity. Hokowhitu’s (2009) argument takes as its central 27axiom the importance of emphasizing “indigenous extentialism.” Originally presented as a critique of Indigenous studies, his argument is that the field has been mired in a focus “around either the purity of a mythical pre-colonial past and/or ‘decolonisation’. Meaning, [it] is largely divorced from the immediacy of the Indigenous condition” (2009: 101, emphasis in original). He suggests that the “colonial ghosts” that continue to haunt Indigenous studies’ hunt for purity in the past must be excised to avoid the universalizing primitive/civilized discourses which lie at the heart of colonial constructions of Indigeneity.

Though perhaps not immediately obvious, Hokowhitu’s broad approach to Indigeneity is useful to our critique of dominant statistical constructions of Aboriginality. That is, “savage constructions of Indigenous people” (2009: 101) sit as a dominant discourse at the heart of the larger projects of modernity that anchor colonizer settler nation-states’ approaches to dealing with Indigenous peoples. It permits certain ways of talking about Indigeneity, while marginalizing others. Hokowhitu’s (2009) argument also has a deep resonance for thinking about the kinds of knowledge construction that characterize Indigenous statistical research. It helps us to explore and delineate the paradigm of Indigenous quantitative methodologies.

Using Hokowhitu’s lens of Indigenous immediacy, therefore, we perceive the current state of Indigenous statistics to mean two things. First, although he is talking specifically in the context of the “authenticity/ inauthenticity” debates characterizing Indigenous studies, his observations help to more broadly situate the power of dominant discourses to shape boundaries about which statements seem reasonable or useful in an Indigenous context and which are seen as divisive, irresponsible, or even nonsensical. Indeed, we can quickly see the extent to which development-based discourses, backed by a multiplicity of “objective” statistical data detailing the socio-economic depression of Indigenous communities (see Salée 2006 for an in-depth discussion of the Canadian literature), complicate our ability to demonstrate the value of such data to our communities beyond existing configurations. So the story (one with which we are in partial agreement) goes: the problems experienced by many of our Indigenous communities are real and longstanding (in relative terms), and as such, need solid information to be addressed and alleviated.

Closely following from a landscape sitting so squarely in the light of these development discourses—and in many ways more concerning than the issue of a lack of uptake in the Indigenous scholars’ community—is how profoundly these discours...